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Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster Could Crash Back Into Earth

Researchers have found that Elon Musk’s Tesla
Roadster car, launched towards the orbital plane of Mars, has a small but not
insignificant chance of hitting Earth in the next few million years. Writing in
their paper, available on arXiv and
to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the
team from the University of Toronto in Canada said there was a 6 percent chance
of it hitting Earth in the next million years.

That rises to 10 percent over 3 million years. The
team, who specialize in orbital mechanics, used their existing models to
simulate 240 future possible paths for the car, launched on SpaceX’s Falcon
Heavy rocket on February 6. Although they note it is hard to get exact
figures due to its chaotic orbit, it is possible to determine statistical
probabilities of collisions far into the future.

“We have all the software ready, and when we saw the
launch last week we thought, ‘Let’s see what happens,’” Hanno Rein, the study’s
lead author, said in Science
Magazine. “So we ran the [Tesla’s] orbit forward for several million
years.”

The car is on an elliptical orbit lasting 1.5
years that takes it out to roughly 1.7 AU (astronomical units, 1 AU is the
Earth-Sun distance), about the orbit of Mars. It then swings inward to about
0.99 AU before heading out again.

The team found that the car’s first close encounter
with Earth occurs in 2091, when it will approach to about the same distance as
the Moon and possibly be visible to telescopes on Earth. After that, there are
a number of different possibilities, depending on what happens to its orbital
path as a result of interacting with other bodies.

Some of the outcomes gave the car a 2.5 percent
chance of hitting Venus within the next million years, while there was a tiny
chance of it hitting the Sun in 3 million years. There’s a 50 percent chance
the car will survive for a few tens of millions of years. Earth seemed to be
the main target though, although we probably don’t have too much to worry
about.

“It will either burn up or maybe one component will
reach the surface,” Rein said. “There is no risk to health and safety
whatsoever.”

And that’s even if the car survives that long in its
current form. By some predictions, it will have been mostly stripped
away by radiation within just a year. If it ever does make it back to
Earth, it might not look too recognizable.

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